Creating the Ontology of Islamic Medicine Based on Semantic Web: A Review Study

This study aims to investigate the necessity of designing the Ontology of Islamic Medicine in based on the semantic web.

In this review study, the studies related to the creation and evaluation of knowledge organization systems (KOSs) in Islamic Medicine as well as the ontology design in traditional medicine in the period published from 2010 to 2022 were searched in databases including Magiran, NoorMags, ISC, ResearchGate, PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Selection methods for study: In this study, the documentary method was used. After searching using related keywords, 20 eligible articles were selected and reviewed.

Ontologies, by covering hyponymy, meronymy, equivalents & specified relations, as well as having a multidimensional structure and covering functions such as eliminating ambiguity, controlling synonyms or equivalents, establishing explicit semantic relationships such as hierarchical relations, and presenting both relations and properties of concepts in the knowledge models, can represent more complex relationships than other KOSs. 

Ontology design is one of the most effective methods for accurate semantic description of the knowledge of the Islamic Medicine. One of the capabilities of ontologies is to display relationships between concepts related to diseases, symptoms, drugs and diagnoses using a graphic environment. Semantic Web technologies raises the necessity of designing ontologies.